Category: Official announcements

Online payments

Today, online sales are done with a few conditions.

Usually, these conditions involve paying high transaction fees, time for the registration, an agreement to a monthly payment, loading up a customer account or reaching a minimum order level before buyers are able to purchase things online, while security standards are not always on the highest level.

These issues apply to both sides, customers, and suppliers.

Requirements of these online-payments can be diverse for both parties:

Requirements for Buyer

Requirements for Seller

Highest security

Highest security

Insurance in case of a loss/damage

Reliability of the payments and network

Low fees

Low transaction fees

Cancellation option

Minimization of shortfall in payment

High acceptability

Cost-efficient implementation

Usability

Simple management

Low time for delivery

Speedy payment procedure

Low Hardware-requirements

Low running costs

E-commerce in 2017 can be, therefore, many things. Todays payment-options are either fast, cheap, or simple, but not all in once due to the technical limitations of the common systems such as high transaction fees, clunky processes due to security reasons, or minimum order value.

Satoshipay

2014 Satoshipay was founded by Meinhard Benn (CEO), Henning Peters (Technical Advisor), Kilian Thalhammer (Payment Advisor) in London, with their headquarters in Berlin.

Satoshipay enabled e-commerce payments when they started with Bitcoin, but after months of developing, testing and strategic decisions, they decided to go with IOTA instead.

With IOTA as the backend technology, SatoshiPay is able to offer the highest standards of online-payments with all advantages.

Incredibly fast

Lowest fees

Decentralized, reliable system

100% Data-integrity for secure payments

No third-party access

No minimum order value

True micro-payments

Easy integration for websites

Low running costs

One practical use-case of buying an online daily news-article, therefore, can be a new experience.
As many providers offer a membership with a flat-rate, or monthly price for access to an article section, it’s practically impossible to buy just a single article for a quarter, online, without any further liability.
SatoshiPay enables a new form of online payments where customers will be able to pay for a single article without having to bother about any requirements on top of that.

This barrier-free solution is the future of online payments as it combines all perks a payment provider can offer today.

IOTA’s Tangle architecture makes it furthermore future-proof, as the system becomes faster, the more people use it and a quantum-proof algorithm is integrated for the challenges of tomorrow.

The Satoshipay IOTA Flash Demo

The SatoshiPay + IOTA proof-of-concept demo shows how the powerful IOTA system can be used as the settlement system in SatoshiPay’s backend to execute payments over the web.

Originally, SatoshiPay used the Bitcoin blockchain as settlement layer, the only viable option at the time. But as the transaction fees in the Bitcoin network increased to unacceptable levels, it was necessary to switch to a system which could provide a long-term, scalable solution for transacting nanopayments at speed.

The IOTA distributed ledger technology is exactly such a solution. The IOTA network (the “Tangle”), offers zero-fee transactions and does not limit the number of transactions per second, making it unique among cryptocurrencies and an ideal ledger technology for SatoshiPay’s future needs.

Satoshipay writes:

As of today, we have a working demo that supports initial funding of the SatoshiPay web wallet with IOTAs, nano payments for individual content items and pay-outs to content publishers. As with the current SatoshiPay solution, no extra software needs to be downloaded by the consumer and there is no log-in. The consumer also never gives up control over their funds, because their private keys approving fund transfers is never shared with SatoshiPay.

When a user visits a website with SatoshiPay installed, an IOTA wallet is immediately created on their behalf in the browser.

To begin the demo, start by filling your IOTA wallet. In our demo, the wallet will be funded for free. Notice that there’s a zero in the center of the orange circle located in the bottom right-hand corner of the website. This means that your wallet’s balance is currently 0i. Let’s change this by filling your wallet: Start by clicking the orange circle located in the bottom right-hand corner of the website to open the wallet. Click “Fund the Channel”, wait a few seconds for the proof-of-work to finish, and you’ll now see a positive balance in your wallet. (Proof-of-work is required to participate in the IOTA network, the Tangle.)

Close out of the wallet and scroll down on the demo website to find the “See it in action” section. In this section, there are links to various content items. Click on any one of them and notice that the content is behind a paywall.

This content is accessed for just fractions of a cent, and denominated in IOTA (see exchange price here). Click the orange “Pay -amount- i” button located at the upper left-hand corner of the content, wait a few seconds, and the content will become available to you! 90% of the IOTA paid is transferred to the content owner, while SatoshiPay deducts a flat 10% service fee. No other payment service provider has ever been able to enable transactions this small at such a low fee. This is nano payment magic.

Troubleshooting: It may take a few seconds for the content to load after making the payment. If it takes longer than 10 seconds, open your wallet (by clicking the orange circle in the bottom right-hand corner of the website) and click “Channel Transactions”. Doing this should allow the content to properly load. Remember that this demo is only meant to be used on a Google Chrome browser.

Rinse & repeat. For every content item the content owner sells, there’s a flat 10% fee charged by SatoshiPay. No matter how high or low the price, no matter how many sales. The content owner is paid out in IOTA tokens, which can then, in turn, be converted into fiat (Euro, Dollars, etc.) via an exchange. Feel free to purchase more content items on the demo website, explore the wallet’s past transactions, or even reset the demo and start over.

When finished, go to the wallet and press “Close Channel”. Your Flash Channel will be closed and your transaction bundle will be attached to the main Tangle. You can still reset the demo after that.

Technical Highlights

IOTA’s Flash Network:

While the IOTA Tangle only increases in speed as more users adopt it – to a point where there is for “all practical purposes unlimited throughput” – the Flash Network is a protocol implemented to make sure large volumes of transactions can be performed at speed today. Over time, as the Tangle adoption rate grows, the IOTA Flash Network will not be needed.

The creation of the proof-of-concept website coincided with the announcement and early release of IOTA’s new Flash Network technology, which allows instantaneous payments by creating a layer on top of the IOTA ledger. Our demo features a fully browser-based implementation of the Flash Network.

SatoshiPay’s Settlement System:

SatoshiPay is an interface that creates paywall features straight in the browser and interacts with a settlement network in the back (in the present case, the IOTA Tangle). By installing the SatoshiPay widget on a website, a content owner is able to sell content directly to their visitors without asking them to log in or install anything.

It works by installing a crypto-wallet in the user’s browser, over which the user has full control (i.e. neither SatoshiPay nor any 3rd party can’t touch any of the funds on the wallet), that can transact directly with the website owner. Because SatoshiPay facilitates peer-to-peer transactions between two participants on a distributed ledger, there’s much lower friction and overheads. This means it’s economically feasible to transact in super-small amounts, while only charging 10% tx fee (compared to existing payment service providers, who’ll tend to have a 30c min fee + 2-5%).

Hello Folks,

As my blog was growing insanely over the last months (already over a quarter million visitors), I decided to change a few things in order to keep up with the demand of information.

IOTA is a great invention, and also extremely difficult to explain and understand.

In fact, If I try to explain the technological advances of IOTA to new people in this sphere, I lose them at “distributed ledger technology”.

IOTA is not a separate program or an autarkic system, on the contrary, it’s an open eco-system that will presumably be a part of everyone’s life in a few years, if the current development keeps its current momentum.

Several companies are lined up to work with IOTA, hundreds of people all over the world are running a full-node and countless developers are applying for the ecosystem fund. It’s only getting bigger from here on!

To understand an eco-system I must deliver information as such.

I, therefore, will broaden my spectrum to keep up with everything.

Explaining Series

I will illuminate basic terms and topics of the Internet of Things, to set a basic level of understanding

I will enable a voting system for terms that you’d like to understand.

The Explaining Series will appear two times a week

Cryptogossip

I’ll cover relevant information of alt-coins if they are in a competition of IOTA

You are a developer? Think about helping IOTA and earn bounties: Ecosystem Fund

Which Exchanges are going to list IOTA?

We don’t know! Since IOTA is an open source NGO, there will no Exchange prioritized, so they list it on their own without the decision made by the IOTA Foundation.

According to the founders, all big exchanges are interested, that means Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Poloniex, Kraken, Bittrex, maybe also the Chinese ones like Huobi and OKcoin.

What prices can we expect at the beginning?

Well, that question came up almost 20 times each day for the last months.

That depends on how the markets will react.

Will ICO investors and whales cash out, or do the new interested investors predominate, that waited for this moment for a long time?

Keep in mind that IOTA was mostly traded on YDX, the escrow based trading platform. (That stopped trading until further notice. Will start again after Exchanges listed IOTA. Presumably the 17th. )

While YDX was always a dependable and secure market, many people were afraid to lose their funds, as a consequence they didn’t invest yet.

Some companies don’t use BTC, so they likely will invest when IOTA is able to be traded for fiats like Euro or Dollar.

The current market situation is also important: Cryptoland is in a big bull market right now, either because these technologies are on the verge of mass adoption, or because it’s a periodical bull market that can also end very soon.

If Bitcoin suddenly changes into a bear market, the impact on altcoins and also on IOTA is pretty hard to predict.

IOTA is seen as a potential Bitcoin or Blockchain killer in general.

This originates from the undisputable technical benefits it has over common Blockchains in terms of scalability and the tremendously growing ecosystem that is already attracting the industry.

No one can predict which side wins, but we will see that very soon.

On the long run, my personal opinion is that IOTA is the best cryptocurrency to invest in.

If there are no technological flaws, we will likely see a few billion in market cap very soon. Or more.

One example of how cryptoland is reacting to good news and opportunities was Ripple, that was pumped from 250 million market cap to almost 17 billion in a timespan of only 4 months. That is insane.

For now, all we can do is read articles, compare the tech, the possibilities and keep an eye on Twitter, especially Hashtag #IOTA and #IOTAtoken -and think about the existing solutions for assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Are they able to resolve the rising fees, the slowly extending confirmation times or not?

IOTA is not stigmatized with the common Blockchain problems like a rising difficulty, decentralization due to big mining farms and therefore an uncertain future.

However, IOTA isn’t easy to understand at first, so maybe the majority of investors needs time to digest all these new features and perks IOTA inherits.

That being said, as an investor you have the duty to make your homework before you put your (life) savings in a cutting edge technology.

Development Update

Since a few weeks we are waiting for the new version. Just now, a small hint arrived that this may soon™ be over:

I’ll give you a short list of what we can expect and as an addition, a small summary of the biggest things you might have missed. The May Report 2.

The most important piece first: In a few days, IOTA will show its capabilities.

Right now, a day after Doms small update (above), the Coordinator is online again, but not attached to the Tangle.
That means:

An update of the new IRI is imminent.

As Dom pointed out: There will be no snapshot, for now.

We can expect big announcements in the following days (Maybe also when and where IOTA will be listed).

The wait is finally over!

With the new version, the spammers can be used for the main net again.

Countless new full nodes will be set up, mine including (Let’s meet in #nodesharing when the new IRI/GUI is here).

After the update the Tangle and the confirmation timings will be faster than ever.

YDX can withdraw all iota.

We’re getting closer to the “liberation of the Tangle”, when the Coordinator will be shut down in July. Then, the Monte Carlo Random Walk algorithm will be activated instead.
That way, the tip-selection and protection of the network will be ensured, while the scalability can unfold perfectly.

Take a look in our slack in the next days to catch the next instructions and announcements. That way, we can build the Tangle topology, again, -in no time.

If you are a developer, please take a minute of your time and look at the ecosystem fund, if you want to work with and for IOTA:

Consensus 2017

Cryptocurrencies, in general have come very far.
Consensus 2017 was held nowhere else than on the New York Broadway. Hundreds of participants, CEO’s, thousands of enthusiasts were there, to share their knowledge and to show the world that Blockchains (and the Tangle) are here to stay.

As a part of Dominik Schieners US-journey, He also participated in the “IoT & Blochchain: Powering the Connected Device Economy“-Panel on Monday 22th.

David Sønstebø wanted to participate, but due to an unforeseen accident he stayed in Norway and sent Dominik Schiener instead.

Dom did a great job in describing his vision to the plenum, while the content of the discussion were not actually focused on a comparison of IOTA to Blockchains.

Instead, the discussion were hold on a meta-level and the experts shared their thoughts and insights about the chances of collaborations of banks and Blockchains, their personal vision and the problems and chances they may face in the future.

Also part of Consensus 2017 was Dr. Carsten Stöcker who took part in a panel discussion about “Energy Markets“.

Carsten, as always, did a great job in explaining his vision and afterwards, he also found a moment of his time to explain why he didn’t get into IOTA’s details. -For a good reason.

He furthermore announced that IOTA is on the testing roadmap for “Share&Charge” where IOTA is used to tag IoT devices.

David added: “We’ll unveil more info on the ‘Digital Twin project’ together next week, so stay tuned for that”

For now, it’s unclear how and where these researches take place and what will be achieved, but considering the big list of known companies on the list, we can expect some interesting projects and fruitful results.

If you need a good comprehensive blog-post by Dominik Schiener, with an up-to-date overview of IOTA, I recommend this:

If want to have a deep-dive into IOTA, how it works, where it comes from and where we're going, read: https://t.co/jpbIQXj7Ul

So, this is another conflict of interest of the DCI.
This pretty much proves the dirty business conduct of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, and the DCI.
And people still think IOTA are the criminals... you can't make that up.